Aditya Nigam

Professor

Aditya Nigam works in the broad field of social and political theory. After two decades of political activism and ten years as a full-time political activist of the Left and the trade union movement, Nigam now pursues his political interests on the intellectual plane. Consequently, his work is concerned with the constitution of political subjectivities, and on a larger canvas on the multiple formations of ‘the political’.

Nigam is currently working on a longer-term study of ‘capital’ from a post-Marxist perspective that attempts to interrogate its received history. This exploration increasingly comes up against the social science knowledge-apparatus that colludes in producing capital’s claim to universality. Thus, the exploration of capital’s history becomes closely tied to his other interest of mining traditions of thought other than the western. Nigam has also been associated with a group of South Asian scholars from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India, working around the idea of the ‘post-national condition’.

He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011).

Aditya Nigam is part of the Centre’s Indian Languages programme and its Teaching programme, ‘Researching the Contemporary’.